The Comeback Route

by Jamie Bennett

  “Tatum, while I appreciate that this is very upsetting for you, and while your use of Spanish is great, you’re actually here to do a different job. Remember? You work for me, here, at the bakery,” Lucy reminded me.

  “Right,” I said slowly. “I had forgotten that. Thanks, Lucy.”

  “Mamá, her boyfriend is going to jail. Give her a break! It’s so romantic,” Chara sighed.

  “He’s not going to prison.” I quickly washed my hands and helped Lucy box up some pastelitos with guava and cream cheese. “And in my experience, prison isn’t romantic at all. First of all, it’s a lot louder than you would think! And second, the lack of personal space is a huge issue.”

  “What do you know about that?” Lucy asked me, staring.

  “Me? Here are your pastelitos,” I told the customer. “Muchas gracias por venir a nuestra empresa.”

  “De nada,” the guy answered, and left quickly.

  Lucy stared at me. “Tatum! I’m very impressed! As of last week, you couldn’t say adiós.”

  “Thanks. I was really worried yesterday and I needed something to distract myself, so in between reading federal drug statutes, I studied some Spanish. One thing, though—I forgot to get money from that guy for the pastries. Be right back.”

  When I returned to the bakery with the bills in my hand, I motioned to Chara. “Let’s put together our strategy for El Asturiano so I can focus on keeping Nico out of prison. That’s a pretty important topic for me.”

  Chara and I squished together at the one tiny table. Seating was one of our discussion points, and I pulled out the permit application for outdoor tables that I had started to complete and handed it to Chara for future use.

  “Thanks.” She glanced at it. “We really should do outdoor seating, right? On days when it’s not raining like this, people would love it.”

  I nodded. “I think the sidewalk is wide enough. I would have laid down to measure it out but it’s wet and I’m wearing my power suit.”

  “We could always use a tape measure instead of your body.” She looked at my red blazer. “Why are you dressed like that today? With your hair so…” She held her hand over the top of her head to show where mine was reaching.

  “I wanted to look like one of the people at the apartment working on Nico’s problem. Problems,” I pluralized. “They need to listen to me and Nico won’t let me do a British accent. That really would have helped.”

  “They should listen to you,” Chara agreed. “You have a lot to say and you’re right about some of it.”

  “Thank you!” I told her, gratified. She pulled out her laptop, which I admired greatly and praised extravagantly.

  “Seriously, Tatum? You’re that broke, you don’t even have a computer?”

  “No, but I haven’t had one since…I guess I never really used one, besides my dad’s. I didn’t do a lot of work, before. When I was in school,” I explained.

  “How did you pass?”

  “I didn’t very much. That was one of the reasons my father was mad at me. Like your mom with you,” I offered.

  “I do good in school! I mean, I do well,” Chara told me. “Pretty well.”

  “She said your grades dropped and you got a D last semester.”

  Chara started to get angry again but then just looked a little sad. “Yeah. I was shocked, too. And it was in science, which I always liked before…”

  “Before Pirro?”

  “He has a free period when I have Physics,” she explained. “We hang out together.”

  “Hm,” I said. “I failed classes all on my own. I didn’t need a boy to distract me.”

  Chara typed angrily. “Let’s do this stupid project and stop talking about Pirro!”

  “Is he out with someone else?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer, but she typed harder.

  Chara and I worked with only the distraction of eating some rosquillas de limón with coffee until Lucy tapped me on the shoulder. “Tatum, there’s a car double parked outside and the driver says he’s waiting for you.”

  “What? Oh.” I checked the texts on my rudimentary phone and there was one from Nico, saying that he had sent a car to bring me home. I had been calling him and sending him messages all day, but the only thing he had answered was that he was fine, that they were working on it. “It,” like it was nothing, like it was just the same as when by mistake I had locked myself in the lab at my high school and there had been a little fire. I frowned, remembering all the foam retardant. Maybe that was a bad comparison.

  I got my things together and hurried out to the car. On the way back to the apartment, I quizzed the driver on his knowledge of Nico’s situation to get more local opinions, but it turned out that he was into the ponies and didn’t have a lot of input. I needed to talk to Salvador, Lucy’s nephew and my original cabdriver here in Miami, to get the lowdown on what people were saying, so I put in a call as we drove through the wet streets.

  It was quieter in front of the building, with the reporters very subdued. “The police had to come because some of the camera guys got into a shoving match,” Del explained. “The lawyers upstairs in your apartment, they’re trying to have them arrested for loitering or some such.”

  I handed Del his bag from the bakery. “It’s a milojas de merengue, but I don’t think it’s holding up very well with this humidity. That’s a bad idea to antagonize the reporters with the loitering stuff,” I said, shaking my head. “Dumbasses. There’s a better way, and here it is. Can you hold the umbrella over me?” We walked back outside and I opened my pink boxes to offer the various treats that I had brought with me from El Asturiano.

  All the reporters waiting to ambush Nico were very happy and surprised. “They’re from Nico,” I told them. “No, please don’t record me. He knows you guys have a crappy job, having to stand around in the rain and wait for him to show his face like a groundhog!” I said this over and over again, in different variations, along with, “No, we don’t have any comment about what happened last night, except that he looks forward to telling his side of the story soon. Try one of those, you’ll love them! And this is all from El Asturiano bakery, a Miami tradition since 1965.”

  Despite the umbrella work by Del, I was pretty wet by the time I made it up to the penthouse, and my large hair and power suit were wilting. The scene was much more controlled than the night before and the team of people sat surrounding Nico’s agent at the large dining table with neat stacks of files and their laptops ready. I saw a few new faces and the security guys were gone. At the moment, all of their eyes watched the big TV across the room in the living area, where the screen showed an image of me in front of the building about five minutes before, holding my pink boxes.

  “Hey, there I am!” I exclaimed. “I told them not to film me. After the topless shimmying thing,” I started to explain, but trailed off when I saw that now, the people at the table had turned to glare at me.

  “What in the fuck do you think you were doing? Handing out cookies to the reporters?” one of the crisis management people barked. He stood up. “Are you fucking serious?”

  “Completely serious,” I told him. “And, by the way, you’re welcome.”

  He opened his mouth but Nico stood up from the couch where he had been watching the story, too. “Don’t swear at her,” he snapped. “Don’t use that tone with her, either.” His own tone didn’t leave any room for argument. The other guy sat down, closing his mouth but clearly with plenty more to say. “They looked like they enjoyed themselves,” Nico said to me, his voice back to normal.

  “Totally,” I said. “I got good press for both you and for El Asturiano. I’m kind of killing it so far today for the bakery, but now I’ll turn all my attention to your issues.”

  “No.” Ethan Tolvaj stood up from the dining room table. He did not look good after the long night with little to no sleep. “No, you should…what’s her name again?”

  I opened my mouth to say that I was Phillipa Grenville-Sackville-Stirling,
British media darling and stock market whiz, but Nico answered for me. “Tatum,” he said simply.

  “You should stay out of this, uh, Tatum. There are professionals at work here,” Ethan started to tell me sternly, but Nico spoke again.

  “Tatum has a lot of good ideas.” He gestured to the TV, where the reporter was holding up an El Asturiano box and the logo was clear and legible on the screen, along with the address. Awesome! “This is the first time all day that they haven’t included the words ‘indictment’ or ‘additional charges’ when talking about me.”

  “Nico,” the agent started to say, but Nico ignored him. “You can’t talk to the press,” Ethan told me instead.

  “I’m very photogenic, and I’ve already started to build a positive relationship with them,” I stated. “Unlike you guys, trying to get them arrested for doing their jobs. I mean, please.”

  “That was his idea,” Ethan said, pointing to one of the lawyers, who in turn looked intently at his laptop. “I think that now I remember her, from when I was here before,” he continued to Nico, studying me closely. “She was the one who said that she wanted to be your stabilizing force.”

  Yeah, that hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped. “Here’s what I think,” I said, and took Nico’s hand. This was his life, and he had to be part of putting together the plan to save it. I pulled up a chair to the dining table and gestured for him to put his ass in it, then started to place myself on his lap.

  “Let’s get one for you, too,” he told me instead, and squeezed in another chair at the table.

  “Great.” I took out my notebook and opened to a fresh page. “So, what have you done so far? Have you gotten the charges dropped yet? Are other football teams interested in him yet?” They looked at each other, and the answer was clearly no. I rolled my eyes. “Have you even heard his side of the story?”

  “Nobody ever asked,” Nico said, “and I didn’t have the urge to volunteer.”

  “Jeez, how much do you pay these people per hour?” I asked him. “Well, go ahead. Fill us in. How did you end up in a drug house with gang ties after which you assaulted a police officer? Allegedly.”

  I could tell that the people around the table didn’t care, because they started shuffling papers and squirming a little, especially when Nico didn’t start talking right away. I tried to patiently wait, but finally I reached over and poked him. “Spill!”

  I was getting ready to poke again when he grabbed my hand and held it. “Stop,” he told me. He went on talking, but right to me, not to the table. “I went yesterday with two Cottonmouth players who I’m not going to name. We were, I thought, going to the stadium. I hadn’t been there yet.”

  I knew who the other two players were, because I had seen them come up on his phone. “And? You made a detour, right?”

  “They didn’t want to go to the stadium at all. They said we were going to meet up with some of their friends. I had no idea that the neighborhood we were driving to wasn’t a good one. I don’t know my way around here.”

  Yet another reason to figure out the city you lived in.

  His grip on my fingers tightened. “I went into the house with them, yes, but not to buy or use. I just went along until I saw what was happening inside and then I told them we had to get the fuck out of there. But I hadn’t driven us and they said they needed a minute. They were buying coke, not Molly. Bags and bags of that shit.” He shook his head. “I ordered a car to come get me but I think no one wanted to come to that part of the city, so it was taking forever.”

  “Ok, so he was trying to leave. See?” I pointed to the lawyer across from me. “Did you know that before? There will be records of that.”

  “I had decided that I was going to wait outside, no matter how bad it was out there, when the police came—”

  “The police just happened to arrive almost exactly when three football players did?” I interrupted again. “Sounds suspicious to me. Check on that,” I said to the crisis lady sitting next to me, and tapped her computer screen with the hand that Nico wasn’t holding. “Write that. Got it? Ok, the police came? Where were the other two Cottonmouth players?”

  Nico shook his head. “I have no idea. I guess they ran out the back somehow. All of a sudden, guys in black were bursting in, there was a loud bang, yelling…” He explained the resisting arrest thing, which was exactly what he had said to me before: he had freaked out when people lunged at him and his immediate reaction was to fight. “And that was what happened. And here I am.”

  “That’s a good story,” the head crisis lady said, “except we have to have a better reason for you resisting because they almost certainly have body cam footage of what really happened. Here’s what we’re thinking,” she told him, and started on a terrible lie about him having a problem with seizures. Both Nico and I were shaking our heads before she got very far, and he interrupted her.

  “I’m not going to say anything ‘better,’ because what I just told you is the truth.”

  “Sure, sure,” Ethan soothed. “Nico, we will need the names of the two players you’re claiming…I should say, the two players who drove you there.”

  “No.”

  “Nico—”

  “Have you eaten today?” I asked Nico, and he nodded tiredly. “Gone outside?” Now he shook his head. “Then let’s go down to the pool and swim,” I urged, standing up. “You need to get away from this apartment.”

  “You mean, I’ll swim and stop you from going under?”

  “If you want to play hero for me, sure, but I’m fine floating,” I said, and he actually smiled a little. “The reporters won’t be able to get at you. It’s pouring rain so there won’t be anyone at the pool except the lifeguard. Let’s go.”

  Nico stood up. “Yeah. I need to get out of this apartment.”

  It was obvious that the other people at the table didn’t think much of my plan, the way they frowned and shook their heads, but I had never bothered much about disapproval before. If I had, I never would have gone ahead with the fur dying—natural dyes—that I had done at the animal shelter near my dad’s old house. And that had turned out great! A lot of the dogs at the shelter got adopted, because looking so good had given them the confidence to come out of their shells. Highlights and lowlights could change lives.

  Nico and I rode the elevator silently down to the ground floor and walked quickly toward the back of the building. The rain had started to come down in sheets but it still felt warm enough to me. “Hi, Bastián,” I called to the lifeguard, who was huddled under a cabana and looked miserable. He waved back, then disappeared back into his swim coat like he was freezing. I decided to bring him some cookies tomorrow and a thermos of soup if it was still raining.

  Nico walked right to the edge of the deep end and dove, but I took a more careful route on the steps on the shallow side, with Bastián giving me a thumbs up of approval as I did. It was maybe not the warmest, now that I was all wet, but this was much, much improved from being cooped up in the apartment. I watched Nico swim under the water, the length of the pool, until he surfaced in front of me. “Better?” I asked, and he nodded, flipping his hair back from his forehead.

  “Tates, I’m sorry.” He sighed and then took a big breath. His blue eyes looked so worried. “I’m really sorry I did this.”

  “Why are you apologizing to me?”

  “I let down my life coach,” he said, but the smile that sprang to his lips died pretty fast.

  “I haven’t always made all completely correct choices like I’m doing now,” I told him. “There was the thing about the counterfeit bullion, the vegan muggings…”

  “The what?”

  “I’m just saying, everybody fucks up, even me. Even other people who you wouldn’t ever expect to do something really wrong, they sometimes do. It can shock the hell out of you, but we’re all human.” I pushed back his dark hair, and let my fingers stay against his cheek. “Are you going to give up the names of the two Cottonmouths who brought you to that house?
”

  “No. I don’t know why I’d do that, and ruin their lives and careers. They’re both married. One of them has three kids and the other’s wife is expecting their second.”

  “Oh, jeez.”

  He nodded, and sank down into the water before resurfacing. He tilted his chin up towards the apartment building. “They’re working hard, coming up with ideas to clean up my image, but first I have to stay out of jail.”

  “Oh, you won’t go to jail. Anyway, it would be prison. But the first thing I did this morning was figure out which countries don’t have extradition treaties with the United States, and I did it from the lawyer’s computer, so that search will be privileged.” I touched his face again. “I’ve always wanted to go to the Maldives, and also Oman!”

  “You’re something else, Miss Smith.” He grinned, a real smile that drew one to my face as well. “Come on, I’ll pull you around the deep end.”

  “Don’t let go of her!” Bastián called, and got his orange float ready, just in case.

  “I won’t,” Nico said. He held both my hands tightly. “I’m not letting her go.”

  Chapter 9

  New opportunities await you just around the corner! But remember, it could be any corner, so don’t get upset if you don’t find the particular corner today, and be careful rounding them too quickly.

  Yours in prudence, Mysti

  By Saturday, Nico had to leave the apartment. He had to go to his lawyer’s office for another strategy conference, because all the people working from our dining room table had slowly bailed to go back to their actual places of business, although Ethan Tolvaj seemed like a permanent fixture in the penthouse.

  I watched Nico leave while sitting at the tiny table at the bakery, his movements breathlessly reported to us live via a sports app on Chara’s phone. María José and Roger came out of the back to watch too, at the shots of the tinted windows in the SUV that drove him to the office, a brief look of him inside the building lobby as he waited for the elevator to take him and Ethan up to the meeting. His handsome face was set in stone and he didn’t answer any of the shouted questions through the thick glass doors. I bit my lip a little, wishing I was there with him.